First U.S. museum exhibition devoted to Contemporary sculptor Thomas Houseago opens at Storm King

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MOUNTAINVILLE, NY.- The first monographic museum exhibition in the U.S. of works by internationally acclaimed Los Angeles-based sculptor Thomas Houseago will be presented from May 4 through November 11 at New York’s Storm King Art Center, one of the world’s foremost sculpture parks. Thomas Houseago: As I Went Out One Morning is a group of approximately 25 works featuring a number of the monumentally scaled, free-standing figural sculptures for which Houseago is best known as well as portrait heads; architectural and animal sculptures; abstractions; floral reliefs; and a selection of the artist’s rarely exhibited sculpted furniture and drawings on canvas. The exhibition will be installed outside around the museum building and in its galleries.

Dating from 2007 to the present, the works on view document Houseago’s emergence as a mature artist and explore the principal themes, imagery, and technical practices that inform his art. Carried out in a variety of media, Houseago’s sculptures are notable for the wide and ever-expanding range of influences they incorporate—from classical statuary to Cubism to popular culture. Central to much of his work is the transformative power of scale, expressed in his outsized human figures and replicas of everyday objects. While many of his forms are instantly recognizable, others challenge accepted notions about the boundaries between representation and abstraction. Still others explore the physical and psychological nature of the sculptural process itself. Houseago’s increasing fascination with outdoor installation and sculpture that interacts with the environment makes Storm King an ideal venue for this important mid-career retrospective.

Storm King will be the only venue for this exhibition, which is organized by Storm King Director and Curator David R. Collens and Associate Curator Nora Lawrence. David Collens states, “We are extremely pleased to give our visitors this opportunity to view his sculptures in a setting that is so appropriate to the aims and impact of his art.” Nora Lawrence adds, “We are thrilled that he was inspired to create new work in response to the intimate and enveloping experience of nature at Storm King.”

The exhibition at Storm King is not only the first by an American museum to be exclusively devoted to Houseago’s work, but also the largest and most comprehensive presentation to date of his sculptures in this country. Roughly half of the works will be on the patio and lawns surrounding the museum building; the balance will be installed in the building’s interior galleries. The title of the exhibition, As I Went Out One Morning, is taken from the title of a 1967 Bob Dylan song that invokes the 18th-century British radical and American Revolution sympathizer Thomas Paine. Like Houseago’s works themselves, the exhibition’s title is meant to conjure up multiple associations—including the artist’s English roots, the artistic and personal freedom he discovered in America and his response to the bucolic splendors of the Storm King setting itself.

The outdoor installation features a number of walking and standing figures that are central to Houseago’s oeuvre, among them Striding Figure II (Ghost) (2012), a 15-foot bronze whose hulking, flat-footed form exudes a sense of both physical strength and emotional vulnerability. Characteristically, portions of the figure appear unfinished, exposing cast metal supports that could be taken for bones or, seen against the Storm King sky, branches of a tree. This is the artist’s first large-scale sculpture in bronze made for display outdoors. The mysterious, totem-like Rattlesnake Figure (Aluminum) (2011) was inspired by the artist’s recent encounters with venomous snakes on his California property; the work’s angular distortions and dislocations of form—it was cast from a wooden figure carved with a chainsaw—at once reflect Houseago’s fascination with folk art and his long-standing study of Picasso.

By contrast, Standing Owl I (2012), another tribute to California wildlife, has an almost whimsical quality despite its imposing eight-foot tall stature. In an homage to David Smith’s Personage of May (1957) sited nearby, the artist has given the work a new greenish-black patina similar to that of Smith’s sculpture.

Column I (Light House) (2012) began as a simple clay column that the artist manipulated and reworked over a period of days, resulting in an image suggestive of a battered Hellenistic statue. A work of multiple meanings, it references the artist’s involvement with performance art, classical sculpture, and what he sees as the primal urge to humanize architectural forms.

Two of the artist’s oversized plaster chairs, made, in part, in tribute to the late Austrian artist Franz West’s own furniture fabrication, will be installed on the patio of the museum building, evoking the central importance of the studio in his domestic and professional life. A new mask, designed to weather as the season progresses, will be attached to the façade of the museum building.

The interior galleries feature a series of portrait busts, including Classical Head I (2010) and the Star Wars-inspired Vader Mask (2008), as well as a selection of monumentally scaled everyday objects whose practical function and symbolic connotations resonate with the artist. His eight-foot-long Spoon IV (2010), for example, invites considerations of the history of this ancient utensil as well as its prominent place in the imagery of Surrealist art. Gold S-Bend (Sunset) (2009), a gleaming bronze of elegant curvilinear and interlocking forms, is one of several works in which Houseago purposefully blurs the lines between representation and abstraction.

Thomas Houseago was born in Leeds, England, in 1972, and studied art at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design and at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 2003, after a period of time in Brussels, he moved to Los Angeles, where the expansive spaces encouraged the artist’s exploration of outdoor installations. Considered one of the most exciting and original sculptors of his generation, Houseago enjoys an international reputation and has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Edinburgh, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Paris, New York, and Venice.

His sculptures are included in several prominent public collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum Abteiburg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; S.M.A.K. (Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art), Ghent, Belgium; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His figural work Baby (2009-10) was a highlight of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2010 Biennial, and his L’Homme Pressé (2011) presided over the Grand Canal during the 2011 Venice Biennale. Most recently (May 2012-March 2013) his Lying Figure (Mother Father) (2011) was installed in New York City’s High Line.